Nørrebro Bryghus – Pisner Beer

It pretty much goes without saying why the association of wee and wort does not typically sit well with beer aficionados. But rest assured, with regard to the recent buzz about a special pilsner beer being brewed by Nørrebro Bryghus, the Danish microbrewery located Copenhagen, Denmark, there is no piss in the Pisner.

Simply put, Nørrebro Bryghus is brewing a batch of Pilsner using malt made from grain fertilized with urine. The cringe factor lies in the fact that the fertilizer is human pee collected from specially designated urinals at the 2015 Roskilde Festival near Copenhagen.

But cringe not! In what is being called the Beercycling project, 54,000 litres of pee was collected from festival attendees by the Danish Agriculture and Food Council, and in the spring of 2016 Danish farmers used the urine to fertilize their crops which yielded 11 tons of barley.

That barley was then malted and brewing began at the end of March, 2017. By June 60,000 bottles of Nørrebro Bryghus Pisner beer will be made available to the public.

I’m not sure of the distribution and availability, but most of us probably won’t be able to try it. I’m sure there are many of us who wouldn’t bother, even though the beer itself is free of pee.